Philip > Philip's Quotes

“It is hard to make the boat go as fast as you want to. The enemy of course, is resistance of the water, as you have to displace the amount of water equal to the weight of the men and equipment, but that very water is what supports you and that very enemy is your friend. So is life: the very problems you must overcome also support you and make you stronger in overcoming them.”
― George Yeoman Pocock

“It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can't waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused. I've just gotta take care of it myself' Joe Rantz”
― Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

“As Joe raised a hand to acknowledge the wave of applause rising to greet him, he found himself struggling desperately to keep back tears. He had never let himself dream of standing in a place like this, surrounded by people like these. It startled him but at the same time it also filled him with gratitude, and as he stood at the front of the room that day acknowledging the applause, he felt a sudden surge of something unfamiliar—a sense of pride that was deeper and more heartfelt than any he had ever felt before. Now it was on to Poughkeepsie again, and then maybe even Berlin. Everything finally seemed to be starting to turn golden.”
― Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

“The ability to yield, to bend, to give way, to accommodate, he said, was sometimes a source of strength in men as well as in wood, so long as it was helmed by inner resolve and by principle.”
― Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

“I like being alone. I have control over my own shit. Therefore, in order to win me over, your presence has to feel better than my solitude. You're not competing with another person, you are competing with my comfort zones.”
― Horacio Jones

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” -”
― Terence McKenna

“Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”
― Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

“But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around.”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen.

This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you--the ability to imagine.”
― Michael Crichton, Sphere

“Still, I wondered what Sam, mental illness and all, might have to tell us about adulthood. Why, for example, did it seem to be always receding as a concept, even as we got older?”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“I was getting interested in self-transformation. I was straining to understand the worldview of the islanders whom we moved and lived among—and I had been doing so since before Guam, when I let myself sink deep into the coral-pebble speed-checkers subworld around the sakau bowl in Pohnpei. I had come here to learn, I figured, and not just a few things about some far-flung places and people. I wanted to learn new ways to be. I wanted to change, to feel less existentially alienated, to feel more at home in my skin, as they say, and in the world.”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing us, or reducing us to code and murmurs, as though we were in church. There was too much to say, too much emotion, and therefore nothing to say.”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“The existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing--a radical critic, like Brown, of received wisdom, and similarly inclined to see mental illness as a sane response to an insane world, even as a form of "shamanic" journey--described in one of his early books what he called the "ontologically secure" person.”
― William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

“She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames -- unseen, vile, deadly.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“In the last few months, perhaps because he has had no one to speak to -- or at least no interlocutor who can respond with actual out-loud speech -- he has learned how to let different parts of his mind and heart speak within him as if they were different souls with their own arguments.”
― Dan Simmons, The Terror

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan

“You humans have a certain talent for adaptability--at least in the short term.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are. Their perspective is so narrow, so... brief. A few years. In the best of them a few decades. They care only about the time they are in power.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“Ever been in love?' The question was direct, matter-of-fact.
'Halfway, half a dozen times. But'—she glanced at the nearest telescope—"there was always so much noise, the signal was hard to find.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

“The art of diplomacy is the luck of knowing more of your rival's secrets than he knows of yours.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“All events, no matter how earthshaking or bizarre, are diluted within moments of their occurrence by the continuance of the necessary routines of day-to-day living.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“...the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them, even as all else had been lost: dignity.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness. To be deprived of it is to be de-humanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below mankind. Men subjected to dehumanizing treatment experience profound wretchedness and loneliness, and find that hope is almost impossible to retain. Without dignity, identity is erased...

[They] learned a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler’s death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people: Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point in which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty... degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.”
― Laura Hillenbrand

“It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.”
― Terence McKenna

“She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people", that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
― Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“The trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone